Old Woman Poaching Eggs

Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez (Spain) 1656

Old Woman Poaching Eggs
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Las Meninas is one of those paintings that everyone who has ever opened their eyes has seen. If not in the flesh at the Prado, its home since the grand museum’s opening in 1819, then in textbooks and on postcards and mousepads and memes. Diego Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece is widely considered one of the most important paintings in art history. Baroque era artist Luca Giorgano said it represents the “theology of painting.” Picasso painted 58 versions of his fellow Spaniard’s magnum opus.

The massive canvas lets you walk right into the artist’s studio, and there he is, painting the picture before you, a shadowy, angled affair that draws the eye right to its centrepiece, King Philip the IV’s infanta daughter and her entourage, including her beloved bodyguard, a mastiff, and an attendant with dwarfism.

By the time he created his masterpiece, Diego Velazquez was a few years shy of the finish line, after a long and illustrious career as court painter to the King of Spain. Las Meninas was his opus work. Before the Prado, it hung in the palace, where Diego lived and worked on site.

Old Woman Poaching Eggs, by Diego Velazquez (Spain) 1618

Nice work if you can get it. Few painters in history lived in palaces with guaranteed paycheques. And this was the Spanish Golden Age, no less. It was a rare life of privilege, a position deserved for Velazquez talent and determination.  But perhaps I’m not the only one who laments a gift that seems squandered on dreary portraits of the court, of this count and that, for the Royal Collection? Velazquez works are pure mastery of technique. But what else? If Las Meninas is full of provocation, curiosity, complexity and innovation, many others are stalwart, standard, even dull portraiture. If I should feel awe or admiration looking at Pope Innocent X or another portrait of a court lady, I don’t. I feel nothing.

Velazquez used tenebrism, a word from the Italian, tenebroso, which means “dark, murky, gloomy.” Artists like Velazquez and Caravaggio worked with tenebroso and chiaroscuro, painting inside this drama of dark and light for enigmatic effects and strong contrasts. Velazquez prepared his canvases with a deep ruddy brown and worked directly from there, seldom using separate drawings and sketches. But what do we feel of that moody approach? Where is the immediacy and the intimacy? 

Perhaps what could have been is best glimpsed in his early painting, Old Woman Poaching Eggs (housed today at the National Galleries of Scotland.) Diego was around eighteen or nineteen when he created this exceptional artwork, a bodegon painting featuring a haunted old woman making eggs for a young man. 

Before Velazquez moved to the royal palace of Madrid, he was a young man of modest background in Seville. He began a six-year apprenticeship with Francisco Pacheco at the tender age of ten, training rigorously in the techniques of art like proportion and perspective. Pacheco literally wrote the textbook of the era with The Art of Painting, a posthumous treatise on technical and thematic prowess for Christian painters that remains a classic in Spanish.  

As with Italy especially and European art history in general, art was a rich tradition of Catholicism, offering an array of dramatic themes, an integral part of the spiritual and community life of the Spanish. Diego of course painted religious works as had his teacher and all of his predecessors and peers. But paintings of everyday objects and scenes rather than religious or mythological stories were becoming widespread around this time, and Diego’s practice included pictures of citizens at the table, bread, leeks, bottles, and eggs.

Paintings of peasants and merchants and foodstuffs came to be known as bodegon paintings (sometimes called tavern paintings) in the Spanish tradition, which were still life paintings of culinary objects and food, often featuring people and scenarios as well. Still life and genre paintings were historically on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of art. Painting peasants in everyday life, or objects without people, did not match the lofty ideals of myth and meaning in religious, royal, and historical narrative painting. But even so, they were exceptionally popular and beloved. Art was an integral part of spiritual and community life, a staple of the Catholic churches. But after that, many more people visited taverns than royal corridors or the hallowed halls of academia. Bodegones showed off the prowess of the artists, enticing those with some means to commission a painting- look at the details here, the transparency of the glass carafe of dark wine, the metallic glint of the brass mortar and pestle, the glaze inside the cazuela. And they spoke to the people with representation of familiar objects and events, reflecting their world. 

Diego’s egg painting is extraordinary. Eggs in art history held layers of symbolism from ancient times, including essential nourishment, life itself, and regeneration and renewal. The artist contrasts the new potential of life in the eggs and the youth and the wine with the elderly woman near the closing of her chapter. Velazquez honours her with a dignified posture, elevating her life as a subject worthy of attention. Cooking and sharing food is exalted. The depicted characters could be our own family. 

The dignity afforded here to peasants turns up again later during Diego’s time in court, when he gives humanity and depth to the faces of people with differences and disabilities, such as his portrayal of a court jester, Portrait of Sebastián de Morra. The Spanish court had the regrettable practice of employing people with dwarfism or deformities in a similar spirit to their later employment in circuses and zoos. Under Diego’s brush, however, they were fully human. 

The tenebrism that defines much of Diego’s work is already present in Old Woman Poaching Eggs, but here, the shadows are alive, flickering with intrigue and possibility and bustle. The painting balances mastery and mystery, while offering common, everyday people a place at the table. 
 
 Lorette C. Luzajic

Las Meninas, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1957